First Look: Will the $99 Ouya gaming console succeed?

First Look: Will the $99 Ouya gaming console succeed?

3:00 /
March 29, 2013

We take a brief look at the Ouya, a $99 Android-based video game console. It lets you not only play games, but develop them as well.

-Hey, guys.
Eric Franklin from CNET.
And today, I'm taking a first look at the Ouya.
The Ouya is a $99 video game system that hooks to your TV and runs on Android.
It hooks to your TV via HDMI.
There's also a 4 USB port.
There's an Ethernet port.
There's also a micro USB port.
There's built in WiFi.
There's support for the 5.1 sound as well as
Bluetooth.
So, the interesting thing about Ouya beyond its really low price is that it's really trying to support the Indi Game Development Community.
Every Ouya is also a development system.
So, you can take the Ouya, hook up your computer, download the SEK or as they call the ODK.
And then, you can start making games on it.
You can submit the games to Ouya and hit around, according to them, is about an hour to 2 hours.
And then, your game is just on their store.
People can download it and, depending on what's your business
model is, you know, you can start getting paid.
Speaking of which, every game on Ouya is free to try.
So, you can download your game and then try it for a little while and see if you wanna keep on playing.
The pay on each game as a business model, you can pay micro transactions or pay for the full game.
The console's actually this little small box.
It's less than a pound in weight.
It has a power button at the top.
Also comes with a controller.
The controller, actually, looks a lot like the Xbox controller.
It has dual analogs, but there's a deep pad in the middle.
There's a home button,
2 triggers and 2 bumper buttons.
The controller felt great by hands.
It was pretty light.
It fit my hands really well.
The handles fit really well.
Playing the games, it was- the buttons were very responsive.
But I only used most of the face buttons.
There's also a touch pad on the face of the controller that is used in some games.
So, in one game, I had to kind of like scratch the touch pad really quickly in order to get something to happen which is kind of a cool thing, kind of a new cool thing.
I got to play maybe 15 minutes
worth of games.
Most of these were just Indi games.
I also got to play Final Fantasy 3 for a couple of seconds.
Some of the graphics are kind of like retro pixel-y graphics that you see a lot in Indi games these days, but some had, like Final Fantasy 3, have [unk] graphics that looked pretty sharp.
The system outputs to a 720p as well as an 80p.
The Ouya game console is available to early backers right now and everyone else will be able to purchase it on June 4th, 2013.
It'll cost $99 for the box and the controller.
So, it's gonna be interesting to see how well this does.
This is not going to compete directly necessarily with the PS4, the next Xbox.
This is not as powerful as those systems, but for people who are into Indi games, for Indi game developers, you know, $99 is not a lot of money for a console.
Once again, I'm Eric Franklin and this has been the first look at the Ouya game console.